


one for sorrow, two for joy

by awrfhi



Category: Phandom
Genre: (it's basically just latin but we'll ignore that), Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21925624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awrfhi/pseuds/awrfhi
Summary: phil has been tasked with protecting the kingdom he loves from the clutches of dark magic. everything is going smoothly - that is, until a certain wayward prince stumbles into the picture and throws everything into disarray.
Relationships: Dan Howell/Phil Lester
Kudos: 6





	one for sorrow, two for joy

**Author's Note:**

> hi!
> 
> truth tea: i haven't written in months. i've been feeling.. disconnected (?) from writing and kind of shitty about myself in general (but i'm working on that). i figured a good place to start building up confidence would be reposting a fic i previously deleted. i wrote this particular one for the prb 6 months ago so some of you might have read it before lmao
> 
> having said that i'm currently writing another prb fic (sherlock themed and v exciting) and i have some ideas i'd really like to see through if i can keep up the motivation so look out for that! 
> 
> finally, thank you sososo much for all the sweet messages that convinced me to start this again. from now on if i ever don't like something i've written i'll orphan it instead i promise <3

In a town nestled on the edge of the world, a pair of bleary eyes watches the sun spill over the horizon. They watch, through a window clouded with condensation, how it trickles, down and down, into everything that lives and breathes and resides in this small pocket of the universe.

The landscape is split in two by a wall high enough to graze the clouds. To one side of it, there are people milling around, basking in the light and warmth and still fresh air that only morning brings. To the other lies a wasteland, beautiful in the most bittersweet of ways. For as long as life has existed on one side, life has been decidedly absent on the other.

He watches as the first rays of sunlight get thrown back from the wall in a cluster of inky sparks, and his jaw all but drops at the sight. Barely any time has passed before the powdery remnants of daybreak are carried away with the morning breeze.

This is the first time he’s seen dark magic. It won’t be the last.

There are footsteps from inside his house, then the slamming of a door and the hollow emptiness that rings out afterwards. If he looks closely enough, he can see his father making his way down the trail that runs from their house to the wall. 

In the not-too-distant future, there will come a time when he’ll be the one who wakes up with the sun and ventures out to the wall. He’ll get to prove himself like he’s always wanted to, and show destiny that it didn’t make a mistake with trusting him with this responsibility. He’s spent his entire life preparing for this, for the moment he gets to witness the unpredictable nature of the unknown up close. 

When all the noise and chaos has settled down, like ripples stilling on the surface of a lake, he pulls away from the window and tucks himself under his blankets. He just hopes he’ll be able to finish what they started. For now, however, he decides to go back to sleep.

* * *

Today’s the day. 

Five years of bruised limbs and scorched fingertips, five years of quiet, tearful nights spent underneath the stars, five years of  _ almosts _ , has all come down to this. 

For today is the day that he, Phil Lester, finally restores peace.

It’s been exactly a year since his family moved to the safety of Hazelwood, leaving him with the weight of the world (and the hopes of one) teetering on his shoulders. He tells himself he can handle it, mainly because he doesn’t have a choice in whether he can or not, but also because he isn’t too sure what would happen if he gave in to the voices in his head taunting him with how wildly out of his depth he is.

His father had told him that no amount of training could properly prepare him for what’s out there. His father had dedicated his entire life to ending this curse, to restoring the natural order of things. His father is everything he’d dreamed of being and more.

Maybe his doubts are right. Maybe the universe made a mistake in letting this happen. Maybe he isn’t the one to end this. 

But he’d be damned if he didn’t at least try.

His things have all been neatly packed into a satchel. As soon as he picks it up and slings it onto his back, he knows he’s ready to leave.

In many ways, today is just like all the other days he’s spent here: he’s alone, save for any animals he meets on his journey to the outpost, he’s putting himself in some form of danger for ‘the greater good’ and he has some song or another stuck in his head. Listening to music helps with the loneliness, but it’s never been enough to make him completely forget his solitude.

As he makes his way along the trail, he hums a tune he doesn’t know the name of and smiles when a couple of birds in the neighbouring trees begin to sing. Their soft music stays with him until he’s finally able to sling his satchel onto the forest floor and sit down.

“ _ Ignis _ ,” he whispers, watching as the pile of ash in front of him flickers into life. 

The light helps him to see if there was any dark magic around while he was asleep. If his calculations are correct, it’s been exactly a month since the last storm shower, which means there’s another due today at some point. Every shower before has gradually been getting weaker, to the point where all the darkness in the world could be completely eradicated by tomorrow if he gets it right.

Despite the years of training and guidance from his father, the final storm shower was something even he couldn’t help with. Generations and generations have lived with the knowledge of how to tame such darkness, how to stop it from harming innocent lives, but not what to do when it’s gone.

There’ll be consequences. There always are.

He spends the rest of his day waiting, filling his time with practising counter attacks and the most powerful magic he knows. Between practice, he snacks on the last of the food his mother had made for him before she went to Hazelwood. On any other day, he’d love her cooking. Today, everything tastes like sawdust.

He’s just going through the last of the charms when his fire blows out.

The effect is instant. Any sunlight disappears in a cacophony of sparks that fizzle into nothingness. Every creature and plant around him is suddenly rooted in place, frozen in a moment in time. Echoes of screams whistle past him, chilling him to his bones. The clouds above him swirl and hiss and froth, threatening to burst open and rain down.

He squeezes his eyes shut, clenches his fists and speaks.

“You’re early.”

The echoes intensify until Phil has to cover his ears to try to block out the noise. This storm already feels stronger than anything he’s faced before, and now that he’s managed to piss off the darkness, he’s not sure how much more he can handle.

So he runs.

He runs as fast as he can to the nearest tree, expertly dodging every lance of darkness that shoots past him from all sides. When he gets to the tree, he ducks out of the way of another shot and begins climbing up. This tree is one of the oldest in the surrounding area, with low branches and smooth bark that makes it easy to scale. 

It’s also one of the tallest, which is what he could use right now. This storm is already so unpredictably huge that he doesn’t know how far it’s spread. If it gets close enough, it could be powerful enough to crack the wall open and-

He can’t think about that. Instead, he channels his energy into hauling himself up from branch to branch until he reaches the top. In just under a minute, he’s clinging onto the very top of the tree, finally high enough that he can stick his head out above the canopy and see what’s going on.

(For once, having black hair actually comes in handy. His mother was furious when she’d caught him with questionable mixture of ground charcoal and water soaking into his scalp, but it was too late by then. He’s never looked back since.)

He’s so taken aback by what he sees that he almost loses his footing.

The storm’s spreading far quicker than he can handle, along the edge of the wall and down to where the mountains begin. It may be strong, but it thankfully isn’t strong enough to break through the countless protective spells he’s used on the wall. Where the wall ends, an invisible barrier stretches upwards into the sky, not showing any signs of moving.

He shifts his feet around so he’s facing the mountains; dark magic can only travel upwards so far before it rolls back down and causes even more destruction. If he has any hope of stopping this storm, he has to start there. 

“ _ NOX _ !” he cries, summoning every ounce of strength he has to send the incantation hurtling from his mouth to as far as the eye can see. 

It’s a spell he came up with himself, and it works. If he fights fire with fire and counteracts the darkness with darkness of his own, the two cancel each other out. He can then use the remaining energy to create a light so powerful that even the sun pales in comparison. And with that light, any darkness is expelled.

(Light and darkness cannot coexist. If one is powerful enough, it will inevitably drown out the other. Phil’s ancestors used to harness the power of the sun to diminish any traces of darkness, but he prefers to be pretentious and make a sun of his own.)

The collision of two such volatile elements often results in leftover energy; the form it takes can vary, but Phil’s practised the  _ liquefacio _ spell to turn that energy into rain. When it’s liquid enough, the rain will fall down through the trees and slowly bring everything back to life. It’s the most gentle way he’s found of dealing with the aftermath of a storm shower, a way that doesn’t harm anything more than it already has been.

When his spell reaches the darkness, the two slam into each other with such force that everything around him starts to tremble. The air crackles with electricity at a frequency that pierces through his bones and worms its way into his ears. His head spins with it.

Before he loses his balance and falls, he scrambles down the tree almost as quickly as he climbed up it. Once he’s on the ground again, he reaches his hands up, palms facing the sky, and tries to gauge how strong the storm is now.

He recoils as if he’s been slapped. It’s too strong.

With his mind whirring with a million possibilities, something dawns on him:  _ you can’t end this today _ . And after so many years of being fine, of just quietly getting on with what needed done, he crumbles.

His right hand presses into the bark of the tree, the force of his entire body weight behind it. Today might not be the end of all things, but he can at least keep the storm suppressed until he can figure out another way.

“ _ Corpus lucis _ ,” he whispers, summoning all the light he has within and channelling it into the tree. The glow spreads from the tip of its roots, up and up until it reaches the highest branch. As it moves, the ringing in his ears quietens down, and the world that had been stilled now breathes a sigh of relief.

With the little energy he has left, he makes his way from the tree back to his outpost. His body doesn’t know how to function properly; all he can seem to do is stare down, dumbfounded, the fragments of what could have been already sifting through his fingers. 

He’s failed.

Hot tears spill from his eyes and scorch lines down his cheeks. To think that he’d been dumb enough to actually believe he could have ended this. He knows his father’s watching the storm from Hazelwood, knows how much it’ll hurt him to see a single beacon of light as opposed to a sky full of it. 

When he’s made it back to the outpost, he sits on the same log he always sits on and lets himself break down, lets his sobs ring out in the darkness. There’s no point relighting the fire. If he does, he’ll see everything around him stained with dark magic. If he does, there’s a chance someone’s out there who could see him.

Time passes. He cries, then stops crying, then cries some more. When he has nothing left to give, when his eyes are starved of moisture and his throat aches, he picks up his satchel and begins to leave.

A twig snaps.

He pauses. For the first time in what feels like forever, he has company. If he strains his ears, he can just about make out a person speaking.

“ _ You  _ are quite possibly the  _ worst boy ever _ ,” the voice says. “No treats for a month. I mean it! Good boys don’t  _ rudely abandon their owners in the middle of nowhere _ like that. You…”

It trails off. Whoever this person is, they sound quite distressed. Phil isn’t too good with piecing things together, but it doesn’t take a genius to realise the dog probably wandered off and this owner has just found them again. A pang a sympathy bubbles up in his chest.

There’s a moment of silence. Phil knows the right thing would be to go over to the stranger and help them however he can, but the aftermath of what just happened has completely drained him of any sense of purpose he’d had before. 

His dad was right. No amount of training could have prepared him for this, for the sheer guilt he feels and will continue to feel until he can fix what’s gone wrong. No amount of training will ever be enough for Phil to be fully comfortable with facing such darkness alone, let alone having to help someone else face it.

He remembers a piece of advice he was once given:  _ always check your pockets, son. And always put stuff in your pockets. You’ll never believe the number of times I’ve been saved by past me _ .

When he reaches in, his hand curls around something small and smooth to the touch. As soon as he’s grasped it, he pulls it out and sets it in the palm of his hand, grinning to himself. He didn’t realise he had a firefly lurking in there. He may not want light right now, but the stranger in the darkness surely must.

“ _ Lux _ ,” he whispers, quiet enough that the figure won’t hear him. 

A tiny bead of light swirls out from his mouth and latches onto the firefly, which seems to jump into action. It flies off his hand and begins happily buzzing around; in a matter of seconds, waves of pale, golden light are cast out from the fluttering of its wings. He’s so entranced by the way it moves around that he barely has any time to register the figure looking up.

There’s a shriek.

Phil practically jumps out of his skin. Before he knows it, he’s shrieking too and they’re both shrieking at each other until they realise what’s happening and cut themselves off. The adrenaline combined with the sudden exertion puts him in a weird limbo of being energised enough to run a marathon and tired enough to sleep for days.

“I’m so sorry!” he apologises, trying to calm himself down. His heart is slamming so hard in his chest he feels like it could crack his ribs. 

He slowly moves closer to the figure. They’re sprawled backwards on the ground, one arm clinging to the dog they must have been looking for. The other hangs limply by their side, nursing an alarmingly large dark patch on their torso. They need help, and fast. The least he can do right now is to hold out his hand. 

“Sorry. That must have scared you.”

The figure (male, he’s decided) simply takes Phil’s outstretched hand and lets Phil help him up. As he does, he winces, his eyes darting around to try to figure out his surroundings. Phil would be surprised if he can see anything at all - past this ring of light, it’s so dark that everything has blurred together, no one shape more distinguishable than the other. 

After being able to see where he is, he calms down a little, though the dog in his arms doesn’t seem to be as content. It makes muffled ‘boof’ noises, its tail thumping against the boy’s waist.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” the boy says, a slight tremor in his voice, “what the hell just happened?”

Phil sighs, a sudden tightness seizing his chest. He’s not sure what quite happened himself, nor if he’s ready to discuss it with a stranger who he’s just stumbled into. 

“Do you really want to know?”

He opens his eyes to see the boy looking at him,  _ through  _ him.

“Considering I asked about it, I guess so,” the boy says, his eyes like dark honey. There’s a tenderness to them, a vulnerability that his words would never betray. Phil feels haplessly drawn to him, this person, this human who’s being pulled in a million different directions.

“Alright then.” He blinks, trying to process the situation and explain it in a way that he can manage. “I just watched the past five years of my life go down the drain.”

* * *

_ seven days before _

“I’ll go over the wall,” he says, his voice thick with a kind of vindication he saves for situations like these.

His mother falters. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?” he counters. “If I’m old enough to rule the kingdom, I’m old enough to know what lies beyond it.”

“Are you, though?” she says, too calmly for someone with a storm gathering behind her eyes. “Not a single soul who’s gone beyond the wall lives to tell the tale. I know what you’re like, Daniel, but no.”

Dan quirks a brow. He knows he’s struck a nerve when he’s referred to by his full name. It’s not like he  _ meant  _ to - if anything, it’s self defence.

He’s always been good at being disobedient. As a child, he ‘accidentally’ shot his archery instructor in the foot because she said his aim was bad. He sometimes eats his food from a knife instead of a fork, stays up for hours on nights before important events so he can weasel his way out of them through pure exhaustion and gives his unwanted birthday presents to villagers. 

(Despite what his parents think of the latter, he never saw it as disobedient. Why waste perfectly good gifts on someone who already has multiple overflowing from every available storage unit? The looks on the children’s faces when they realised they’d received a gift from  _ the _ Prince of Hazelwood were better than anything money could buy. Their kingdom may be a little short of money, but it’s never shy in gratitude.)

So, from his perspective, wanting to climb the wall separating Hazelwood from the Darkness is just another item on a list of troubles.

You see, the Darkness is the one thing Dan doesn’t know about. He likes to think of himself as clever in the self-taught kind of way, clever in a way that only books can provide. He’s exhausted the palace library and every consequent bookstore the kingdom has to offer, yet no matter how hard he tries, he’s still just as clueless as to what lies beyond the wall.

As he’s grown older, however, he’s learned how to tame the side of himself that always asks questions without caring about how painful the answers might be. With age comes maturity, the knowledge of how to behave when he needs to and back down from arguments even when he could easily win them. 

This isn’t one of those times. 

“What else am I supposed to do? Pretend part of me doesn’t exist?” When his mother flinches, he almost stops, but he physically can’t bring himself to. There’s too much churning up inside of him, too much anger and sadness and confusion. “I’m the heir to this kingdom. If you’re willing to throw that away, throw  _ me  _ away, over something as petty as who I choose to love, then yeah, I’m more inclined to climb over the wall and-”

“Stop!” another voice yells. Dan turns to identify the source of the noise and his eyes practically roll into the back of his head. The figure standing by the door is none other than the King himself.

“Father,” he says curtly. “Sorry, did we interrupt something?”

“Daniel,” his father replies. “We’ve been over this before.”

“If that’s what you want to call it. From what I remember, it was you screaming at me into submission.”

“Fine, fine,” he says, raising his hands in a sort of contrived form of surrender. “What do you want?”

Dan blinks. He’d like to pretend these fights don’t happen more than they used to, but there’s no point denying the correlation between his little brother being old enough to go off on his own and his parents letting their emotions run high. 

His father’s reaction has stopped him in his tracks. In all honesty, he wasn’t expecting to get this far. Every time before has ended in one of two ways; either his father loses his temper or his mother cries. On some especially rare occasions, both happen. To suddenly have neither of these things happening feels like an out-of-body experience.

He pauses, tries to collect himself. He knows he needs to phrase these words in a way they can all agree with, but at the same time, he wants so desperately to be genuine, to be unflinching and gritty and honest like he’s never been allowed to be before.

He looks up at the two figures standing before him, two parents who may show their love in unconventional ways but try their best, and steels himself.

“All I’m asking for is acceptance,” he whispers, suddenly feeling very small. “There are some challenges in life that I have to face on my own. I… I can’t help the fact that I’m like this, you know? This is the New Age. Maybe people out there could learn a thing or two.”

“When you say ‘like this,’” his father begins slowly, trying so hard to be careful that Dan finds himself blinking back tears, “what does that mean? Are you a homosexual? Bisexual? A… what else is there?”

“Homoflexible?” his mother offers. Dan giggles under his breath, a solitary tear clinging to his eyelashes.

“You could put it that way,” he says. “In all honesty I’m not too sure. I just know I’m… attracted to the male specimen, I guess you could say.”

“Okay,” his father replies. “Alright. Well. You do realise this has implications for the kingdom?”

Dan nods. “I’ve thought about it.”

“We’ll support you regardless of your future spouse,” his mother says, a solemn look on her face. “But that doesn’t mean everyone will.”

“That’s something for me to handle,” he says. “I’ll try to make them understand. Or just blame it on the Elder Ones. Say I was born this way to teach the humble people of Hazelwood a lesson.”

His father, by some miracle, seems to hum in agreement. “They accepted your brother’s veganism well enough.”

When you live in a kingdom nestled between nowhere and somewhere, not a lot tends to happen. As kingdoms go, Hazelwood is known for its people’s astonishing capacity to love one another as well as its natural beauty, with boundless acres of land and orchards that stretch out for miles. Dan doesn’t doubt that these citizens will take to a token gay prince like a duck to water.

“That’s it settled, then,” his mother says, a smile gracing her lips. “We can make an announcement this weekend before your birthday celebrations.”

“Okay,” he breathes out. “Sure.” 

“You may go back to your room, Daniel,” his father tells him.

Dan doesn’t think twice before turning on his heel and making a beeline towards his bedroom. As he walks out, though, he manages a somewhat sincere smile for once.


End file.
